Image, a journal headed by the estimable Gregory Wolfe, has a scoop in its fall issue: the never-before-published college journal kept by writer Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). According to Mark Bosco: “Four years ago my colleague Elizabeth Coffman and I embarked on a feature-length documentary about O’Connor’s life and work, and so we found ourselves at Emory University, where O’Connor’s archive had recently found a home. We already had over thirty hours of recorded interviews … It was time to see – and to touch – the physical objects of her life and photograph them for use in our documentary. We found in a box a Sterling notebook, standard issue for students in those days, inscribed ‘Higher Mathematics I.’ On perusing it we discovered an earlier attempt at a journal when O’Connor was just eighteen years old and already at Georgia State College for Women. She wrote her first dated entry during her Christmas Break, on December 29, 1943, and her last is marked February 6, 1944 – in all, a mere thirty pages. Reading it, you see O’Connor trying out the journal form as a way to examine her thoughts.”

It’s not online, so here is a short excerpt from “Higher Mathematics: An Introduction.” (And you can get a copy of the issue here.)

From the January 19, 1944 page in the journal:

I begin to wonder – what next? I have always wondered, but this wondering is different. This wondering sees me on the threshold of something or near it. I realize for the first time that all these knots must be untied – all this tangle unstrung – and me got out of the middle of it.”

I don’t like to write about things that make me lonesome. Yet they are so big – to me now. I hate to think of saying “goodbye” – the actual mechanics of the thing grieve me more than the loss. The way the rest will do – what they may say. If I should begin to feel sorry for myself – however erroneously – I could easily move myself to a liquid-eyed condition, and that would be disastrous. I have such an affection for myself. It is second only to the one I have for Regina [her mother]. No one else approaches it. I realize that joyfully just now. If I loved anyone as much or more than myself and he were to leave, I would be too unhappy to want myself to advance; as it is, I look forward to many profitable hours. I have so much to do that it scares me.

She was already beginning to experience the symptoms of lupus, which she mistook for arthritis. She was diagnosed with the disease, which had killed her father, in 1952, and lived for another dozen years – five more than expected. She died at 39.

“Writers often realize the power of writing too late.” (Fred Ernst/Creative Commons)

A few days ago on these cyber-pages, Ursula K. Le Guin said, “It worries me for instance when writers put living people into a novel, or even rather recently dead people. There’s a kind of insolence, a kind of colonialization of that person by the author. Is that right? Is that fair? And then, when we get these biographers where they are sort of making it up as they go along, I don’t want to read that. I find myself asking, what is it, a novel, a biography?”

Her comments about how the imagination of children needed training was echoed in our subsequent post about poet Dana Gioiahere. Now we find the eminent Le Guin seems to have channeled her colleague, the novelist A.S. Byatt. From a 2009 article in The Guardian: “I really don’t like the idea of ‘basing’ a character on someone, and these days I don’t like the idea of going into the mind of the real unknown dead,” said Byatt in an interview with the organisers of the Booker prize. “It feels like the appropriation of others’ lives and privacy. Making other people up, which is a kind of attack on them.”

In a more cheerful mood. (Photo: Seamus Kearney)

To tell the truth, her admonition would seem to be common sense for any principled person – not only because of the possible lawsuits, but just because it’s a kind of speculative gossip.

Yet Oscar Wilde appears in her own Booker-nominated novel, The Children’s Book. What does she have to say about that? Not the same thing, she said, because she “doesn’t say what he thinks.” Perhaps it’s because he’s been dead for awhile, too. However, we made something of the same case a few years back with Shakespeare in Love, and Shakespeare has been dead a lot longer.

The effects of such psychospiritual heist can be fatal: “I know at least one suicide and one attempted suicide caused by people having been put into novels. I know writers to whom I don’t tell personal things – which is hard, as these writers are always the most interested in what one has to tell,” Byatt said.

Even bloggers are to blame – modest, unassuming people, like Humble Moi: “Now we have the blog and the facebook everyone is a writer, and everyone’s idea of anyone else, kind or cruel, just or unjust, is available on the web, to be believed, or mocked. Blogs and facebooks, too, have caused suicides. Writers often realise the power of writing too late.”

Random strangers may kill themselves, but our families are deeply affected by our abstraction and neglect, too: “One impact of writing on families is that the writer has to spend long periods alone with a pen, and this time, and this attention, is taken from the family. I knew a writer’s family where the children buried the typewriter in the garden.”

The Book Haven is happy to report that no one has ever buried our MacBook Pro in the yard. No one has needed to. We’ve gone through five in the last year alone. They seem to bury themselves. Read the whole article at The Guardianhere. Easy to criticize the excess, but … she does have a point.

Still on the road – but it may be some time before he gets to Lassen County.

Dana Gioia, California State Poet Laureate (and former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts), is continuing his mission to visit all of California’s 58 counties during his term. It’s not always easy: “I’m trying to go to Lassen County, but Lassen doesn’t have any libraries,” he said. “There are 3,000 people [in the county], and the person who runs the arts for the state there, it’s a part-time job. She also works as a forest ranger. In a lot of these places, I’m the first person who’s ever given a poetry reading.”

And some counties need to be visited more than once. For example, his home turf, Los Angeles County. At an event last week at California State University, Northridge, Prof. Robert Gohstand quoted from one of Dana’s articles, in which the poet claimed that “literature awakens, enlarges, enhances and refines our humanity in a way that nothing else can.”

Dana’s remarks at the Northridge event reinforced what Ursula K. Le Guin said in the previous Book Haven post: that we need to train the imagination. “One of the troubles with our culture is we do not respect and train the imagination. It needs exercise. It needs practice,” she said (read the rest here).

In short, it’s not enough for kids to read cellphone texts, tech manuals, comics, wikipedia, or science magazines. They need to read literature.

An excerpt:

“The early experience of reading opens up something in an individual’s mind and imagination, which makes him or her begin to lead their lives differently,” Gioia said. “Children, from the very earliest age, need to read stories. They need to know how many possible outcomes any story has, how many characters, how many plot reversals. If you don’t train the imagination early on, it tends to be locked into a very narrow set of possibilities.

“It’s the books that capture the imagination that deliver the practical outcomes, rather than the books that are designed with cold-blooded pragmatism to teach people mechanical skills of reading,” said Gioia, who also serves as the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California.

“Literature has the power to arrest the attention to create an empathetic connection as you’re reading, to use your imagination, to fill out the details,” he said. “That’s why reading is a more powerful imaginative exercise than watching a film. The debt that I owe to books, to public libraries, is immeasurable. It made a huge difference in my life.”

Ursula K. Le Guin is eighty-eight years old. Let that sink in: eighty-eight years old. She claims she’s slowing down, but not so much that she isn’t actively participating in the Library of Congress effort to collect and publish her collected works. “What I did not realize is that being published in the Library of America is a real and enduring honor,” she says. “Especially while you’re still alive. Philip Roth and I make a peculiar but exclusive club.”

We were delighted to see her interview at the Los Angeles Review of Books with the Pulitzer prizewinning New York Times journalist David Streitfeld (I describe the occasion of our meeting here.) He’s published his books of interviews with Gabriel García Márquez, Philip K. Dick, J. D. Salinger, and Hunter S. Thompson. Can Ursula K. Le Guin be far behind?

Malafrena (1979), the novel that is the volume’s centerpiece, takes place during a failed revolution in the early 19th century in an imaginary European country somewhere near Hungary.

It’s one of my works that is neither fantasy nor science fiction. So what do you call it? It’s not alternative history because it’s fully connected to real European history. There is no name for it. That’s my problem, I do nameless things.

It’s been a long journey for some of these books. Fifty years ago, they were originally published as SF paperbacks.

David’s won a few honors, too.

I’m not remotely ashamed of their origins, but I am not captivated by them either the way some people are. Some people are fascinated by the pulps — there’s something remote and glamorous in the whole idea of a 25-cent book. I am in the middle of rereading Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Michael is enthralled by the whole comic book thing. That is perfectly understandable and I enjoy his fascination, but my mind doesn’t work that way. I am into content. Presentation is something that just has to be there.

Fifty years ago, science fiction and fantasy were marginal genres. They weren’t respectable. In 1974, you gave a talk entitled “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?”

There’s a tendency in American culture to leave the imagination to kids — they’ll grow out of it and grow up to be good businessmen or politicians.

Hasn’t that changed? We seem inundated with fantasy now.

But much of it is derivative; you can mash a lot of orcs and unicorns and intergalactic wars together without actually imagining anything. One of the troubles with our culture is we do not respect and train the imagination. It needs exercise. It needs practice. You can’t tell a story unless you’ve listened to a lot of stories and then learned how to do it.

You’ve been concerned recently about some of the downsides of the imagination.

I feel fine as far as literature is concerned. The place where the unbridled imagination worries me is when it becomes part of nonfiction — where you’re allowed to lie in a memoir. You’re encouraged to follow the “truth” instead of the facts. I’m not a curmudgeon, I’m just a scientist’s daughter. I really like facts. I have a huge respect for them. But there’s an indifference toward factuality that is encouraged in a lot of nonfiction. It worries me for instance when writers put living people into a novel, or even rather recently dead people. There’s a kind of insolence, a kind of colonialization of that person by the author. Is that right? Is that fair? And then, when we get these biographers where they are sort of making it up as they go along, I don’t want to read that. I find myself asking, what is it, a novel, a biography?

Migrants have arrived in Greece since Hesiod’s time. Certainly, tales of treacherous Aegean crossings fill the pages of Homer. The poet A.E. Stallings has been a student of the classics since her Oxford days, but Homer and Hesiod didn’t prepare her for the hands-on experience of volunteering with refugees during the disaster that has engulfed Europe.

She would meet refugees at the disembarking areas and, with her friends, pass out shoes and serve food. Facebook groups spread the news that 2,500 people had arrived at Piraeus, survivors of the dinghies that washed ashore at the Greek islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Samos, and were moving on to Athens. Or that 20 families had arrived in the port and needed sleeping bags, clean clothes, food.

“It was quite unreal. Two thousand people walking out of a war zone, with muddy feet, poorly dressed,” Stallings said. “Some with wounds, others in fur coats or rags. If you had anything you would wear it. Some people would be coming out with wheelchairs; some were carried out. Others came with a dog or cat. Some had a taxi waiting to take them to a hotel. Others would be walking to Hungary.”

Female. Nine years old. Found wearing a blouse, And a pair of sweatpants patched with Minnie Mouse.

Epigrams were often the form she chose to express the horror and humanity of what was happening around her. “I wanted them to be sharp,” she explains. “Something that had distance, irony. The reality was too overwhelming for a sonnet. These are real people. The situation is bad enough that you don’t have to poetify,” she said, stressing the last word with a little self-mockery.

On land, the adults were bored and anxious, and the children more so. “The worst part is being in limbo and waiting. The uncertainty is really unbearable for people,” said Stallings. “This is their life. Instead of finishing their law degrees, they’re wearing ill-fitting shoes.” She remembered, in particular, a Syrian graduate student who felt his youth was being frittered away. From “The City”:

“I want to go to another land. I want to cross the border,” The young man out of Syria said. “I’m tired of being stuck. Sure, Greece is nice enough if you can get a job: good luck.”

“The saddest cases are men in their twenties. They don’t want to fight for Assad or ISIS. Their youth is being eaten—and they don’t know what will happen.”

Stallings and her friends brought supplies—crayons, Play-Doh, markers, bubbles, and pipe cleaners—to keep the restless kids busy as they waited day after day to learn their fate. “We’re the artists, we’re the painters, we’re the poets. We can do this,” she said. “I’m a mother; I can yell at kids in four languages.”

The Play-Doh, markers, and crayons ushered in a new era for the children. They may not have been eloquent in their native tongue, but were eloquent on paper. One drew a massacre he had witnessed and more than one drew those who have drowned at sea. Others illustrated bombings, one with the word “Assad” written on the aircraft. They made a case for immigration more heart-rending than any politician’s speeches.

We’ve written before about Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo (here and here and here, among other places), who died last July in police custody from late-stage liver cancer, which received very, very late treatment from the Chinese authorities. They had ignored the increasingly desperate pleas for his treatment. His widow is still under house arrest. But that’s not enough. Now they arresting people who sing songs about the writer, poet, and human rights activist. The latest from Radio Free Asia:

The memory lives on: Liu Xiaobo and his wife Liu Xia

A Chinese musician detained since last September for singing about late Nobel peace laureate and political prisoner Liu Xiaobo has been formally arrested, while his collaborator has been forced to leave the city, where he has a job and a family, a rights lawyer said on Tuesday.

Singer-songwriters Xu Lin and Liu Sifang were being held in Nansha and Jiangxi respectively after they wrote songs for Liu, who died in police custody of late-stage liver cancer in July.

Xu Lin was formally arrested for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” on Nov. 2 while fellow singer activist, Liu Sifang, was released on bail.

“Without regular contact with his family and a lawyer, Xu Lin is at risk of torture and other ill-treatment,” London-based rights group Amnesty International said in a recent statement.

Rights lawyer Sui Muqing visited Xu in the Nansha Detention Center in Guangdong’s provincial capital Guangzhou on Monday, he said. “Picking quarrels and stirring up trouble is a charge pinned on dissidents and rights activists for what they say,” he said.

“The charge of picking quarrels and stirring up trouble has become one of the main charges used to crack down on freedom of speech,” Sui said. “Most people who get detained for posting something online are charged with this offense.”

Sui said Xu had requested not to have a lawyer, following a pattern set by other detained activists who strike a deal to plead “guilty” in return for more lenient treatment.

Xu top, Liu bottom

But Sui said Xu didn’t want to use up resources needed by others.

“The main reason was that he didn’t want to take up resources available to other people, not that he was refusing to hire a lawyer,” he said.

“She isn’t allowed to have contact with anyone outside the family, nor can she give interviews to the foreign media,” she said.

“The family have been very worried ever since they received the notice of formal arrest.”

She said Xu Lin hasn’t committed any crime.

“This case is all about the policing of free speech, in the spirit of the [ruling] Chinese Communist Party’s 19th congress [last month],” she said.

Meanwhile, Liu Sifang, in spite of being released on bail on the same charge, has now been forced to leave Foshan, where he lives with his wife and works at a private school, Sui said.

Next they’ll make the signs illegal.

“He lives with his wife in Foshan, and they both work at a private educational establishment there,” Sui said. “He had barely been back at work a few days when the Foshan state security police starting telling him to leave town.”

“Not directly, of course, but they put pressure on him via his employer, who had no choice but to tell him to leave,” he said.

Liu Xiaobo died weeks after being diagnosed with late-stage liver cancer, and repeated requests from his family to seek medical treatment overseas were ignored.

His wife Liu Xia, who has never been charged with any crime, remains under house arrest and continual police surveillance in spite of continued international calls for her unconditional release.

Police have since detained a number of activists who staged memorials in Liu’s honor, including Zhuo Yuzhen, detained in Guangdong’s riverside town of Jiangmen for taking part in a seashore memorial a month after Liu’s passing.

Zhuo Yuzhen, who hails from the southeastern province of Fujian, was formally arrested by police from his hometown and has been sent back to Guangdong to face investigation and prosecution.

“His most characteristic gesture was that shrug, accompanied by the hint of a shy and mysterious grin.”

The Book Haven wrote about Richard Rorty a few weeks ago, in connection with his online interview for Entitled Opinions. He’s been called the most famous philosopher of the late twentieth century, but, as Crispin Sartwell points out, that doesn’t mean much in an era when most people couldn’t name a single contemporary philosopher (and I wouldn’t know him myself had not Czesław Miłosz mentioned him to me as a friend). Said Sartwell: “But within academia, he was as famous as anyone, which in his case involved being almost universally hated: both envied (he was the first and is still one of the few philosophers ever to get a MacArthur) and attacked relentlessly.”

Sartwell ought to know. Rorty was his dissertation advisor for more than five years in the 1980s and they developed an Oedipal relationship that he’s grateful for today. “He kicked my ass all day every day for years on end,” he writes, over at Splice Today.

“I think he was wrong about everything, but at least he was wrong in an interesting and extremely bold way that was exemplary of its moment and helped create it. The academic philosophy of now, often hyper-specialized and extremely competent—isn’t usually brave enough even to be wrong.” Maybe that’s what Rorty himself meant when he said: “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying.”

A few excerpts from Sarwell’s essay:

His shrug was famous.

In the early 1990s I saw him give a lecture to an auditorium full of eminent thinkers and grad students at the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. After he was done giving them his thoughts on pragmatism and truth, they fired away at him for the better part of an hour. Some asked questions. Most simply reviled him and everything he stood for, so hostile that they could barely express themselves coherently.

One person who attacked relentlessly was the quasi-celebrity philosopher Thelma Lavine, who had hosted the PBS series Socrates to Sartre. She was operating with a walker and an oxygen tank by then. I don’t remember exactly what she said but the spirit was this: “You are enemy of all that is good and true, a philosophical anti-Christ here to bring our civilization to an apocalypse”: a last-gasp defense of truth and Plato and all things decent. After that, well-known philosophers came after him one by one or in gangs. He responded in clipped one-line provocations, half Jean-Paul Sartre and half Bill Belichick.

Later at the banquet I asked him how he got through things like that. He just gave the notorious Rorty shrug. “I’ve seen it before,” he said. “They seem to enjoy it.” It didn’t seem to me like Lavine was enjoying herself, but Rorty certainly was.

***

His position was Socratic: you’d come to him with your big notions, essential ideas, revolutionary consciousness, scientific foundations and he’d use the whole toolkit from Willard Van Orman Quine to Jacques Derrida to let the air out of your tires. His most characteristic gesture was that shrug, accompanied by the hint of a shy and mysterious grin, as if underneath the pointed or even whimsical formulation there was a huge structure of ideas and arguments that he was holding back. As a matter of fact, there was.

***

“He kicked my ass all day every day for years on end.”

One thing his many detractors didn’t know was that he was always, semi-secretly, a sweet man, even to a young whippersnapper trying to refute him at every turn, and even as he became a loathed superstar with many demands on his time. As a thinker and writer, Rorty was a real swashbuckler, as bold as could readily be imagined, but one-on-one he was almost unbelievably shy. He found it terrifyingly difficult to greet people in the hall or at a reception, but opened up when happily absorbed in argument, and was completely or even maddeningly self-possessed in front of an audience. He was an extraordinarily gentle man but an extraordinarily aggressive thinker: really, quite the human conundrum.

Nevertheless, one of the most charming things about Rorty—as he showed in that auditorium—was that he delighted in attacks. He was some years past his breakthrough book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) when I was working with him, and was drafting Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, now widely regarded as his most characteristic work. One day in the middle of lunch in his office the phone rang and, as one did, he held up his hand and said, “Just a minute.” Then he launched into an elaborate description of CIS and a lovely assessment of how his own work was changing, how he was so far beyond Mirror of Nature, ready to kill the world. I hadn’t known before that what he was working on. It took me 15 minutes to spin out that it was Rorty’s college buddy, the equally eminent Richard Bernstein, on the other end.

Then he’s off the phone and I start arguing with him about his “literary turn” nonsense. He didn’t respond to my attacks except to give me the in-process bibliography. I read it all. (I can’t find that one. I must have chucked it when I was done.) But the most memorable thing about that phone call was that Rorty rummaged around on his desk and read aloud a couple of the most vicious criticisms of himself, as he and Bernstein cackled (cackling came through clearly on a land line).

***

With Robert Harrison for one of his last interviews.

But Lord the Rort had some critical acuity when he wasn’t just shrugging at an auditorium full of people. … In doing that, he showed me exactly what the highest level of active intellectual life really is, what you have to know to toss off apparently casual provocations and make them stick; he slowly revealed how much machinery was underneath his performance art. I’d been reading harder than anyone I knew since I started getting serious at 12, but in my 20s in the 1980s I didn’t see how knowing what he knew was even possible. He had more or less the whole history of Western philosophy and literature, with little pockets of expertise in all sorts of scholarly byways.

Read the whole thing here. Or listen to the podcast interview here. Or both.

Loyal readers of these pages know the legendary self-effacement and humility of the Book Haven. You should. We keep telling you about it. But we are shedding our accustomed modesty and shyness for a brief holiday.

Humble Moi no more! Now it’s Glamorous Moi! Elegant Moi! For we have had our photograph taken by the esteemed Margo Davis, whose artistic focus is fine arts portraiture.

The notable photographer and I met in an elevator, some years ago. We were both on our way to visit Marilyn Yalom, who was hosting the Middlebrook Salon at her lovely Russian Hill home. Margo was memorable. She was wearing a black leather jacket, with her hair characteristically short, and she spoke in a rapid-fire Connecticut accent (not New York, as my imprecise ear thought).

We’ve seen each other since – usually at Marilyn’s home. So naturally Marilyn recommended her as the perfect photographer for my once-every-seven-years photograph. Marilyn was correct, as she so often is.

Humble Moi is not the easiest client to photograph. I panic and freeze before the camera and my eyes bug out and go glassy. But Margo just kept talking, and she kept snapping, too. She talks about getting to know her photographic subjectsas “a waltz between two people trying to do something in the way of a portrait.”

Margo, in color.

“You have to spend time,” she said. “This is not a journalistic activity, an in-and-out thing.” The result of her efforts above.

Margo has spoken in the past about being drawn to the “landscape of the face.” As a young photographer, she recalled: “When I was going through my proof sheets I realized I was really gravitating toward portraiture. And from that point on, I think I started moving in closer towards peoples’ faces. It was a process, it wasn’t something that happened overnight.”

Margo always uses natural light, and is known primarily for her black-and-white portrait photography, because, she’s said, “you’re already in an abstraction process, because the real world is in color.” In black and white, she’s photograph such celebrities as Saul Bellow, Maxine Kingston and Ursula K. Le Guin as well as average people in Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and Latin America. But in my case she clearly made a colorful exception. In the quick tour she gave me of her home, I fell in love with her black-and-white portrait of an Angor Wat monk. He looks just as uncomfortable in front of the camera as I was, meditation notwithstanding.

An especial focus for her work has been Antigua in the Caribbean, as well as Africa: “I borrowed the methodology of an ethnographer: participant-observation, becoming part of the fabric of the culture,” she has said.

My favorite guy. He looks nervous, too.

“Being married to an Antiguan [her former husband Gregson Davis] and returning there often, I was able to work with this axiom in mind; the importance of getting to really know people.”

She has taught photography at Stanford University forever, as well as the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Overwhelmed? You’re not alone. So was Dorothy Parker. The witty writer penned hundreds of poems and short stories, and was also a popular book critic for The New Yorker. She even tried her hand at screenwriting – and two of the scripts she co-wrote won Oscars. The wisecracking writer, critic, and satirist, was also one of the leading lights at the legendary Algonquin Table circle of writers, columnists, and hard-drinking journalists who gathered daily for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan.

No wonder she couldn’t get everything done. Here’s a 1945 telegram she sent to her editor at Viking, Pascal Covici. And it’s for all of you readers, too, as you struggle to catch up with deadlines over the weekend.

“When I see an image come through in my developer, it stuns me every time. It’s the stuff of magic.”

Lena at work

Lena Herzog is a visual artist and photographer who develops thoughts and ideas as well as images. In his introduction to their conversation,Entitled Opinions host Robert Harrison suggests that her camera follows Joseph Conrad’s aesthetic creed to “render the highest kind of justice to the visible world.” The interview is available on Entitled Opinions new channel over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, here.

Harrison and Herzog discuss the cultural transition to digital photography and Herzog’s penchant for a ghostly or alchemical – or even sacramental – approach to creating images. Herzog usually works with pre-digital cameras, where latent images are transformed into visible ones with emulsions in a darkroom.

The two discuss how many cultures have believed that photographs steal the soul. Have millions of digital images eroded meaning from places and people? Walter Benjamin said that photography is one of the most powerful instruments of desacralization of the world, so Harrison and Herzog discuss the over-familiarization of images of landscapes and objects, in an era when we live in oceans of images.

Herzog argues that the images capture the “inner state of being” of the photographer: “Five photographers are in a trench, they pop out, they take a picture if the same event, they pop back in. They come out with completely different images. Remember the picture of the naked girl at the napalm bombing during the Vietnam War? It’s Nick Ut’s very famous iconic image. On that bridge stood half a dozen photographers, including a photographer from the New York Times who was far more famous at the time. None of them produced images that stuck with us. They were shooting at the same time with the same group of Vietnamese running towards them. This is an extraordinary and fascinating aspect of photography.”

“About five billion people who have cellphones can produce fairly competent images. They’re okay, but okay is not enough.”

“The procedures that I work with go back to dawn of photography, but not for sentimental reasons. It’s just because they’re better. … The possibilities are enormous. When I see an image come through in my developer, it stuns me every time. It’s the stuff of magic.”

“We are three dimensional creatures. We don’t have the companionship and camaraderie with files, with zeroes and ones. Even when you see an image that is perfectly perfect, which is very high-resolution digital, there is something about it that doesn’t speak to us.”

“One of the reasons that I use all these complicated technologies and techniques and large-format cameras is because I want to take special care. It should not be offhand, it should not be careless how I photograph.”

“The mystical part of it is not only that mechanically I can reproduce the astonishing likeness of the world, but also mechanically I can reproduce how I feel, how I see the world. … It not only registers the event, but the photographer’s inner state of being.”

“When an object or a thing or a person is over-familiarized, something happens to it, something in our perception of it happens, and we lose the mystery, the expectations. For me, that’s why celebrities are absolutely uninteresting. Familiar to us, and yet they have become completely unfamiliar because there is a veil of familiarization that holds us back from true understanding. To look at it afresh, to pay attention to it carefully, is a task right now.”